Defuse Or Diffuse?

 

I was reading an essay by Ben Dreyfuss and came upon this passage:

Two friends—one an American woman, one a foreign man—started to really go at it. I was sitting directly between them and kept trying to diffuse the situation since there were a lot of people there and everything was getting a bit personal.

I sort of thought, both of the below words kind of work, but I really like defuse--it seems more definite and therefore, stronger.

Diffuse is both a verb and an adjective, and refers to the spreading of something, or making it less concentrated. Defuse functions only as a verb and means "to remove the fuse from something."